Natural stones are used in landscaping residential and commercial buildings. For example, natural stone can be utilized to form planters, retaining walls, curbing or edging. There are, however, a number of drawbacks and disadvantages to natural stone. First, natural stone must be mined, packaged and transported. Often to obtain certain types of stone, the natural stone must be transported long distances. Thus there are substantial expenses involved in mining natural stone, handling the stone and transporting the stone sometimes as far as country to country.
In addition, laying natural stone is time consuming and expensive. This is because natural stone is not uniform in shape and size. Natural stone is difficult to lay in a mortar base and even more difficult to lie in a dry stack. Further compounding the problem is that skilled stone laying tradesmen are difficult to find and when they are located, they too are expensive.
Because of the expense of natural stone and the difficulties encountered in laying, a market has developed for unnatural landscaping blocks that include a front face that simulate stone, brick or other more traditional landscaping structures. For the most part, these unnatural stone products are of one size or depth. When these stones are utilized to form a retaining wall, for example, in many cases some form of a mechanical tie or support must be incorporated into the wall structure in order to meet code requirements or to meet fundamental engineering standards. Often these mechanical ties or mechanical support structures include a plastic, fiberglass, metal or nylon webbing that is secured between spaced courses of block and extend therefrom where the webbing ties into a backfill material or to a structure or the ground that lies behind the retaining wall. Again, this is expensive and time consuming.
Therefore, there has been and continues to be a need for a landscaping block set that is of a precast type which can be utilized to build a retaining wall without requiring the retaining wall to be mechanically tied or supported to a structure or to the backfill or ground material lying behind the retaining wall.